5 comments about S M L XL: Second Edition.

1. An acquaintance had a copy of this so I looked through it during a dinner party. Blah. Bah! It's full of facetious, egotistical monoliths (from the edifices to the book itself) that offer nothing but themselves to the rest of the urban experience. Le Corbusier of the late 20th century. Gawd, I hope Koolhaas doesn't take that as a compliment.



2. Realmente atendeu as expectativas. Um belíssimo livro em um bom preço e no prazo de entrega informado.



3. So much information that it took too long to get through it before most of it wasn't relevant any longer.



4. There's a terrific line in Breakfast at Tiffany's. George Peppard proudly hands neighbor Audrey Hepburn a copy of his just-published book. She has no idea what to do with it, so she puts it on a shelf next to a vase, backs away and says "Doesn't that look nice?"
   This book is a lot like that. A self-conciously designed object for the homes of style consumers who already have the right clothes and the B&B Italia furniture. A prop for the still-life they want to inhabit. If they ever got around to "reading" it, they'd discover to their great relief... it's NOT a book to be read in any strict classical sense.
   
   It also reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon where one associate asks another, "Read the first few pages of any good books lately?" The age of the short attention span is not going away any time soon. This hefty grey slab is easily recast as the shiny new headstone for verbalized intelligence.
   
   As Kracauer holds it, there's nothing wrong with framing a culture via fragments, but I have plenty of qualms about advancing one's own ideas that way. And I'm suspect of ideas that trowel on style in the abundance seen here. If I could believe Bruce Mau's intentions were more than just trying to look new, (This 'look' now permeates architecture publications) I'd have more respect for this, but it was obviously calculated as a totem of style and style-suffusion.
   
   For better or for worse, the book got noticed, the industry was distracted by the pretty surfaces and the ascent of Koolhaas is a done deal.
   If you want to actually READ a book full of Koolhaas' thoughts, skip this and get a copy of Delirious New York.



5. Possibly one of the many great books on architecture of today with plenty of references and clean graphics. A must have for all architecs or if you just want a wonderfully beautiful book for your home or office.

4 comments about The Image of the City.

1. Given that this book was written in the 1950's, it is still relevent to current urban design thinking. It must have been very innovative in the 1950's.
   
   Once the reader gets past the unusual layout of the book and the out of date language, there are many useful urban design concepts to be found in this little book.
   
   Pathways, boundaries, disconnects and nodes are all discussed from varying points of view, using notable USA cities as examples.
   
   One point of relevance is the statement that there is not one city in the USA that could be considered a great example of urban design (as stated in the 1950's). As an Australian, I could say the same of Australian cities. The Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane are terrible examples of urban sprawl. The north-south spread of Greater Sydney now covers almost 200 kilometres.
   
   The principles stated in this book are still relevant to urban designers today.



2. The urban setting is a composition of nodes, landmarks, paths, edges and districts, accorsing to Lynch. This physical summary of urban landscape may not be satisfactory for some. However, for others, including me, this book is a great help in forming a design perspective at the city level. It does not matter at all if you have just started forming your perspective or working on the final details. The book should be in your library, and the design guidelines should be in your mind, not only when designing a peace of urban space, but also when you are just wondering around.



3. This book describes mental maps obtained from residents in several cities such as Boston, Los Angeles and Jersey City. The mental maps were materialized on paper through an interview process and combined with maps from many individuals. And the results are surprising. Each map is a composite image of the city (and hence, the book's title) that reveals not only the character of the place, but gives you a feeling for it. In Boston for example, the streets are very disorganized, so people give directions by using landmarks almost exclusively. On the other hand, in Jersey City, with extremely uniform architecture, directions are given by street number and points of the compass. An unusual discovery concerns very long streets in Boston. They appear on the map with missing sections - these sections are totally invisible to the people interviewed. In many cases individuals were unaware that Washington street in one neighborhood is a continuation of Washington Street in another neighborhood. These blind spots affect how people move around, it affects the directions they give to others and it contributes or reinforces fears they may have about certain neighborhoods. The book moves from these maps and observations and tries to develop rules of thumb for urban design. People feel more comfortable and perhaps more anchored if they know where they are in space and in relation to visible landmarks. Some cities provide this comfort level more effectively than others - this book tries to find root causes. It's no wonder this is a classic.



4. Kevin Lynch descibes the visual attributes of cities and towns, paying special attention to how we find our way around, how we build a mental image of these places. It is not only relevant to city dwellers, but to anyone interested in the subject of creating communities, real or virtual. A truly wonderful book, with lots of insightful drawings and images. Highly recommended.

3 comments about Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors, Second Edition.

1. This book is very lengthy and full of information, but unlike typical textbooks, it is not overly 'heady' nor boring... Each chapter is quite long (50 pages approx.) and the words are quite small, yet you can sit there for four hours straight and still be interested in what is on the next page!? The only thing that would make this book better would probably be color pictures (there are a good amount of informative pictures, yet they are all black and white). Great book for anyone in the construction industry...very interesting!



2. Time has changed. A few years ago, few people knew about sustainable design and construction, green buildings or LEED. Today, sustainable design and construction has gone mainstream. How do we know? We actually have clients asking us to design a LEED certified building or do a sustainable landscape design. Architecture and landscape architecture are knowledge-based, service-oriented professions. Architects and landscape architects have to catch up and become experts in sustainable design and construction, green buildings and LEED to be able to provide the necessary professional service to the clients.
   
   "Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors" is one of the best books on sustainable design and construction. It covers 10 principles of sustainable landscape construction: keep healthy sites healthy (preserve topsoils and existing trees, minimize construction damages, etc.), heal injured sites, favor living, flexible materials, respect the waters of life (understand, protect and restore wetlands, restore rivers and streams to full health, collect and conserve water, reuse gray water, etc.), pave less (reduce paving, reduce runoff from paving, use porous paving, etc.), consider origin and fate of materials (Use local, salvaged or recycled materials, avoid toxic and non-renewable materials, etc.), know the cost of energy over time, celebrate light, respect darkness (lighting efficiency and light pollution control), quietly defend silence (various ways of noise control), and maintain to sustain (alternate to mowing, bio-based maintenance products, etc.). Each principle is demonstrated with case studies and followed by resources for further studies.
   
   "Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors" has 416 pages and many line drawings and interior black-and-white photos. It is one of the most comprehensive books on sustainable landscape construction.



3. an excelent overview of the sustainable approaches to landscape design, a good basis to start thinking and acting sustainably in the landscape

No comments about The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World.

5 comments about The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.

1. I enjoyed a lot reading this book. it is a traditional but essential book to have for any architecture lover.



2. I shouldn't really be so harsh because I was starting to forget about it has been so long. To be honest your service has been pretty good up till now but this time its a joke I been searching around the neighbourhood and no one has heard of it, I have email and ask if you know where it is and you said it was sent. I have paid for it so I should have it.
   
   Please I do understand this can happen occassionally, but please rectify this ASAP
   
   Thanks, otherwise this is a possitive review...



3. During my 15 years of architectural education and some years of practice (both as architect and as 'explainer' of architecture) I have not yet encountered a book on architecture which has changed my view on architecture so dramatically.
   
   Juhani Pallasmaa's book makes an excelent argument for retrieving in architecture that which seems to have been lost for a long time: the lived intelligence of the bodilly senses. In his book Pallasmaa gives an overview of the development of the occularcentrism which is dominating architecture (and pretty much every cultural aspect) in the Western world for centuries and goes on to show how this leads to an impoverment of the architectural experience (and with that the impoverment of our daily lifes).
   
   The mix of theory, practice and convincing examples (ranging from architecture, art, cinema to literature and poetry together with the size (80 pages) makes the book easily readable, even for the less theoretical inclined reader. My advice: read it!
   
   For those of you who are as impressed with this book as I am: there's another book by Pallasmaa with the title 'Encounters'(published by Rakennustieto Oy Rati, June 2005). This book features a collection of essay's which were written by the author over the last 20 years. This book is also about the phenomenology of architecture but, due to its size (app. 350 pages), gives a broader overview of the thinking and writing of Juhani Pallasmaa. It seems it is not available at Amazon but I hope they will put is on there list soon!



4. In five years of Architectural Design, I am hard-pressed to find a book that has made such an impact on my thinking and overall awareness of architecture. This is truly a must-read for any architecture student, and is extremely interesting for those non-architects out there. I highly encourage the investment.



5. Now back in print and updated into a second edition, this little book is a masterpiece on the differences between what we see in a set of architectural plans compared with what we sense when we walk into a building.
   
   When we actually walk into a building, we are sensing the building with all of our senses. The smell of the still drying paint, the echo's from unexpected sources and more now have an impact that wasn't there in the plans.
   
   This book consists of two essays:
   
   The first surveys the historical development of the eye-centric orientation of our Western culture that began with the Greeks.
   
   The second begins to lay out a way towards a multi-sensory approach to architecture that forms a sense of belonging and integration.

No comments about Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture + DVD.

1 comments about Brakin. Brazzaville-Kinshasa. Visualizing the visible..

1. I just got this book, so I did not read it completely, just parts from it. Thought that a basic review would be good, since this will be the first :). Let's start then.
   
   The book looks nice at a first look. It really is... however, soon you will see some mistakes. I would like to start with them. The most serious problem for me are the 'blind maps'. The authors made a lot of maps about interesting topics, like the diamond trade. They marked all built infrastructure on a map... but that map has completely nothing more. No roads, no labels nor streets... what you can see is two completely blank pages with black circles on it (those are the built infrastructures). And you have absolutely no idea where are they in the city... this is a serious fault. On this level of documentary, the minimum required quality is to make good maps, once they put them into the book. However, on the first 85 pages we are getting pretty nice coloured maps too, some of them are quite big. But all the blind maps are there in this 85, and you will see some of them once more in the middle of the book. So you will see them twice... this has completely no sense.
   
   I found an other problem too. This is not so annoying as the first was, but still a problem. We have small pictures about the city, buildings, people. So actually you are getting a pretty good overview, I really like this. What I don't like is when you have a page with 10 pictures on it, and 1-2 are 'missing'. The explanation is there, so you can read what should be on the picture, but it is blank, you are getting nothing. I found around 10 pictures like this, all of them has the explanation 'not existent'. So probably it has been demolished, closed and so on... but anyway, if I cannot show something to the readers, then I'm not putting it into the gallery part of the book and definitely not adding a comment under it. It makes no sense.
   
   The third problem is a very interesting one. We can read that the language of this book is english. Well, I found english, french and german sentences inside. There are two sections where you can read everyting only on french: the first is the comments part from street children, the other one is some basic description about public buildings, like the post office. There are no english translation for these. The garman part of the book is a complete mistery for me, since I'm not speaking german, so could not understood what's there. Please note that we are talking about only 2-3 pages, so it is definitely not much.
   
   Because of these faults, I gave only 3 as a rating. 3.5 would be my true vote though. 4 is definitely too much, 3 is too low.
   
   About the positive things :), well this book will give you a lot of enjoyable moments. If you like Congo, you will like this book too. These pictures inside are unique ones, you cannot find anything like this on the net. UN forces and buildings, city people, food and market, houses are all on the photos. Some of them are one page large, so you can examine all small details too. There is a comment at every picture, so you will know what are you watching. The book has a story part too, with full of text to read. That is interesting also.
   
   
   Final overview: You should buy this book if you want to know something more about these two cities. You will get a pretty nice gallery with stories too.
   Do not buy it, if you never heard about Congo. In this case you will not enjoy it. I would say some kind of african love is mandatory for a visible collection like this.

5 comments about The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream.

1. In _The Option of Urbanism_, Christopher Leinberger documents the history of both urban ("walkable urbanism") and suburban ("drivable sub-urbanism") settings. Before WW II, most people lived in cities and towns where most of their needs (shopping, etc.) could be met via a short walk, or perhaps, with public transportation.
   
   After the war, the big swing was to the suburbs, due to several factors. Government and financial-institution policies tended to favor the suburbs, freeways, single-family housing and shopping malls....and discouraged any meaningful pro-urban development--at least until very recently. Nowadays there is a considerable demand for more dense housing, with destinations within walking distance.
   
   Although Leinberger is very much in favor of urbanism, he does talk about some problems with it (affordability/gentrification is a big issue with some of the newer urban developments). Neither does he call for the suburbs to cease to exist, although he warns that some suburban developments may be hurt by the shift to the cities, rising gas prices, etc. (This book was written right before the current mortgage and gas price crises, and we're starting to see their effects on certain suburban areas as I write this)



2. Great book. I lived the phases of walkable neighborhoods to driving-suburban. Now we have return to sustainable, walking neighborhoods especially with the gas cost.
   
   As I grew up, I felt supply and demand dictated growth. This book explained government and economic factors that influence development.
   
   good read



3. I met Chris Leinberger 13 years ago when we began in earnest to address how we were growing in Atlanta. He was knowledgeable, articulate and helpful then, and he continues to be so today. I have borrowed extensively from this new book of his in helping people to understand how growth and development issues relate to each other, why we must pursue walkable urban development, and what the multiple benefits are that derive from this approach to development and redevelopment. This book is well written, is appropriate for lay persons and "wonks" and can be read in just a few sittings. Thank you, Chris, for a terrific resource at such an important time in our nation's development history.



4. Written from a perspective that most urban critiques fail to provide, this book grounds the reader in the real estate, demographic and policy realities that have shaped the American built environment into what we see today. Leinberger knows this stuff cold, both as a developer and through his more recent positions in Brookings and academia. He writes in an approachable style and provides the most thorough discussion to date of the entrenched system of subsidies and practices fueling types of residential and commercial construction that is increasingly at odds with the "true" market. Late in the book, I think he makes a rare--but very appropriate--connection between the implication of the continuation of these policies and our future energy needs. For those of us who like a good, constructive reality check now and again in the midst of all the usual suburban finger-wagging, it's a must-read book this year.



5. People outside the planning profession would find this book helpful in understanding new directions that are possible. Developers who are looking for a competitive advantage tool would do well to avail themselves to Leinberger's perspective on urbanism. It is an easy read, not technical, requires no specific background other than a healthy curiosity and drive to do better. City commissioners would also benefit from purusing these pages.
   
   The author is a major mover and shaker in Albuquerque and a key proponent of their downtown revival. Leinberger writes from first-hand experience. I recommend reading books like this because it is a chance to get inside the head of a visionary. A person could easily read one book like this each week; how else could you immerse yourself in 52 change agents per year?? When a consultant of Leinberger's stature shares 5 hours of his insights for less than $20 it is a pretty good value.

5 comments about The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History.

1. Spiro Kostof's book is a fantastic and intelligent foray into urban form. What I found most appealing about the book was his approach in grappling with the WHY of things; in describing how certain urban forms have come to pass, he offers the requisite determined factors as any architect of the City ought to do and then manages the neat trick of gracefully acknowledging that these factors do not necessarily lead to a single outcome. But he is intrepid in his analysis and his approach. Beginners may find this book difficult because it does assume a basic understanding of cities and city planning; however, ambitious readers should give it a try. Mr. Kostof's cultural and historical references and his non-linear style are extremely appealing and intriguing, so much so that I will continue on to "The City Assembled", the companion piece, with great eagerness.



2. este livro possui indicacoes excelentes para um pesquisador da forma urbana e da historia da cidade trilhar seus conhecimentos.
   
   pesquisa seria e escrita magnifica.
   boa escolha.



3. Well written, consistently interesting and structured around the challenges of topography and the urban form demands invoked by market needs, political architectures and cultural expectations through history, this beautifully illustrated book delivers the promise of its title and a lot more.
   
   Because the author, Spiro Kostof, organized his book by patterns and topological relationships, the text compresses history and geographies into a comparative perspective. This presents a disadvantage to the reader if he/she is interested in only one time, one culture or even just one architectural movement.
   
   On the other hand, the comparative perspective lends authority to Kostof's overarching theoretical approach of connecting urban forms to content and how those relationships persist across the spectrum of the human experience. A must for any architect's or planner's library.



4. Perhapes part of Kostof's category for urban patterns( as organic, grids, grand manner....) is arguable, but his wonderful ananlyses for each individual sample lead us into deeper understanding of urban patterns and social meanings behind. Many cities familiar to most of us (Siena, Paris, New Dehli....) appear refreshingly unfamiliar in his book.



5. Probably the most comprehensive guide to the thoughts, theories and practical aspects of designing a city. Buy it and weep for your boring grid plan cities....

5 comments about Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form.

1. I admire and respect Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown for their great career and contribution to architecture, which has yet to be fully assessed. The depth of their thinking, the vigilant efforts to achieve their aesthetic vision, their desire to overcome modernist dogma, which had mutated into marginalized elite uncivic abstraction, falsely denying vibrant areas of life...how can one argue with the importance and value of such work?
   
   Let me try.
   
   To me, this book represents one of the most interesting turning points of an architectural career, very similar to Rem Koolhaas' essay on Bigness in S,M,L,XL.
   
   Both texts are attempting to give themselves an elite artist's alibi for co-opting the corporate machinery's unself-conscious production. Here, both artists (VRSB and OMA)attempt to escape into pop art, just like their friend Andy Warhol, thumbing his nose at the self important abstract expressionists.
   
   There's just one problem with this; they are architects, not just artists.
   And this places them in significantly different political territory. Architects build in the public sphere, and therefore have a powerful civic impact. They enable some political forces, and, by physical default, suppress others. If they were artists, their voice is a singular one, an unsponsored comment, to be entertained or dismissed. Architecture cannot be waved away.
   
   So, being architects, is 'Learning from Las Vegas' and 'Bigness' an elite artist's manifesto, or a cynical architect's effort to solicit clients from the bloated and most lucrative areas of commerce? The ambiguity is disturbing, because ultimately it has proven out not to matter what their intention. Both Venturi and Rem Koolhaas have been most useful tools for the most egregious excesses of our runaway imperial corporate world.
   
   And this is a sad legacy for two brilliant architectural careers. No matter what their aesthetic accomplishments in the way of rarified architectural thought, the more brutal reality is that architects seeking fame cannot also speak truth to power. This gravely undermines their civic responsibilities.
   I am reminded of William Morris' quote, a sad retrospective look at his career, saying that ultimately, his work "only served the swinish luxuries of the rich." A bitter realization for a socialist, one who chose to retreat into archaic craft, instead of trendy pop.
   
   Pop architecture is not a game. It is an insidious symptom of the polarization of wealth, a symptom that Venturi and Koolhaas cheerfully enable, both with their particular form of dissociating irony. They can play with it as a theory, but it has wrought disastrous consequences in the physical and political landscape. Same thing happened to Frank Gehry, another symptomatic starchitectural monster, who apparently doesn't need to theorize. Hard to say when the deal went down exactly. I just don't know.



2. this book is extremely condensed into a multitude of thumbnails or panoramas and text that never fails to reiterate its point. i mean, these two architects really understand the idea of symbols, suggestions, and sheds but after a dozen pages on one idea, you already get the point.
   
   the images are really helpful in exemplifying the amount of criticism for or against the city ("idea") of las vegas.



3. This is a quite unusual and offbeat treatise on architectural theory, as applied to the world's greatest architectural monstrosity - Las Vegas. This analysis from the early 1970s is obviously outdated because Las Vegas hadn't yet become the monument to megalomania and excess that it is today, but it was already well on its way. The authors analyze Vegas' unique usages of space, lighting, placement, transportation, and building design for the purposes of communication and promotion. Strange chapter titles give a clue to the left-field analysis in store, and the authors have a clear sense of irony, underhandedly implying that Vegas presents the worst in architecture while they appear to be praising its uniqueness. Unfortunately the narrative gets bogged down in dense professor-speak terminology like "Brazilianoid" and "neo-Constructivist megastructures," along with a general overload of obtuse theory. Add to that the poor-quality and under-elaborated illustrations and you have a book that sacrifices insight and readability in favor of pedantic attempts to impress the authors' colleagues. [~doomsdayer520~]



4. Read this book to learn what you shouldn't do as an architect!

   This book follows Venturi's "Complexity and Contradiction", where you can learn how cynically to use casement windows in housing for the elderly where the elderly will happily put their plastic flowers in the windows, but *you* secretly know these are not really hormal casement windows, since they are out of scale (like fascist architecture's lack of scale?).

   This book will tell you about ducks and decorated sheds, but it will tell you nothing about building spaces which nourish creative human community. Try Louis Kahn (e.g., John Lobell's lovely little book "Between Silence and Light"). My postmodernist teachers at Harvard said Kahn's writings were incomprehensible, which says more about them than about him.

   Read Lobell's book and learn why, e.g., a city might deserve to exist. Remember: Only *you* can get beyond postmodernism!




5. Robert Venturi's study of the Las Vegas signage phenomena and it's impact on "architecture" is brilliant in it's scope. While written almost twenty five years ago, this book gains more and more pertinence as we as a society progress further into a "reality" of symbols, reproductions and representations. These words and thoughts are basically essential to the understanding of any city anymore, not just Las Vegas. Where this book misses the mark though is in the execution, as shown in Venturi's work, of these ideas. The projects put forth seem to pale in comparison to the implications the text actually has. These notions of architecture are by far some of the most relevant and important in modern theory today, it is unfortunate that their full potential could not be realized in these projects.... but maybe that is for you and I to do.